Azeem Azhar: “The “exponential age” is a point at which the advancement of technology is so rapid that the technologies are getting dramatically cheaper. Or on the other side, they’re getting much, much better at a pace that is felt within a business cycle or within a couple of years, not across decades. And what that means is that their impact is felt now … A general-purpose technology is extremely important. They are so broadly applicable that they impact society left, right, up, and down and for generations to come, such as the printing press or electricity. What I identified were four families of technologies—computing, energy, biology, and manufacturing—that were broadly applicable, could be used in many different parts of our economies, and were all changing at these exponential rates.”
Andy Kessler on the chip (Intel’s 4004 microprocessor launched in 1971) that changed the world: “computing doesn’t stand still. The neural networks used by Amazon’s Alexa to recognize your voice and Google to pick out faces in photos won’t replace the microprocessor, but they will likely serve as a complementary technology that can scale up for the next 50 years. Google is about to introduce a next-generation Tensor chip, updating the ones found in the company’s Pixel 6 phones. It is basically an artificial-intelligence accelerator in your pocket, allowing your phone to adapt to you—your own personal neural network to train. It is exciting and scary at the same time. What will we do with all this power? That question is like seeing the 4004 and being asked what microprocessors will be used for besides calculators in the future. Your answer would probably be off by a factor of a billion.”
David Landes: “To be sure, cocoon economies … helped to shelter Argentina and other Latin American economies from the worst effects of the Great Depression. Such is the nature of cocoons. But it also cut them off from competition, stimuli, and opportunities for growth.” [via CafeHayek]. India must not make this mistake.
